


I'm not living/I'm just killing time

by lolneptune



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: !!!, Bottom Boris, Canon Compliant, Epistolary, M/M, Not Beta Read, Pining, gay angst, indulgent fluff, theo shows boris the book
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:34:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24566206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lolneptune/pseuds/lolneptune
Summary: Of course he had seen the journals. Pages and pages of rambling accounts, an encyclopedia. How could I have hidden it from the one living person who knew me?
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 48
Kudos: 161





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> the obligatory song-reference title is from "True Love Waits" by Radiohead 
> 
> I'm so sorry if this is a mess! let me know if you catch any mistakes, this isn't beta-read and I wrote most of it on ketamine. enjoy!!
> 
> p.s. what theo is listening to https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1ed6IIr0u4WQSY21TDLP9j?si=klqIaSFIS3ujwUeIaBandg

**I.**

Of course he had seen the journals. Pages and pages of rambling accounts, an encyclopedia. How could I have hidden it from the one living person who knew me?

He filled me in on what I’d missed: More than once, black-out drunk, I had gone to write in a journal, left them out on the floor, blurted allusive reminders to myself. Boris mimed an exchange --

_(Reasonable, low.) “Potter, what good is pen in time like this? Come back and let me take another hit.”_

_“Shit, shit, shit, I must write everything down!” (An exaggerated accent -- hard ‘r,’ long vowels, cold as East Coast wind; bizarrely high-pitched, like a girl, for which I punched him hard in the arm.) “I must write everything or I will die!”_

I remember waking one morning in Vegas to an empty bed and an open notebook; the bathroom light was on, sink running, and I could see he’d saved his place. It was the most recent entry, though I had no recollection of writing it.

  
I still have those pages, unique from their neighbors for the drunken, meandering quality of my words:

_Boris smells like sweat all the time and it’s like adult sweat not like Andy’s or Tom Cable’s or mine, it’s all warm like and thick. He smells like smoke and beer. One time he took a shower and he still smelled different from everyone else. Not in a bad way, but if you put a lot of people in front of me I would know which one was him without looking. Sorry if that’s gay. It’s his fault for being so fucking touchy feely, I can smell him everywhere. Sometimes I wish that Boris had known me in New York, before she died. I wish that he had known me my whole life. I wish he’d met her so he would know how good she was and he would know what I’m talking about when I talk about her. I wish we’d gone to the same school, and I could’ve been friends with him and not motherfucking Tom. He could have come over after school. She would have liked him and he would have liked her. It would be weird but good to see them talk. She would have liked his stories and asked me about him when he left. He would stay over all the time, and talk politics with my dad, and maybe he would have made things better around the apartment. He’s so alive, it could have saved us. How can somebody be so alive and so pale? I don’t understand that. She was alive like that when she told stories but she was never pale. I wonder if she was pale afterwards. I don’t want to think like that. Boris is asleep right now next to me. He is drooling a little, and Popper is sleeping on his head and he’s also drooling. Sometimes when I’m with Boris I want to_

And it ends like that. 

**II.**

(no subject)

 **Anyms Sender** <cl9mto1udf@protonmail.com>

to me

Potter long time no c! Where R u? U left so soon! 

**Theodore Decker** <tdecker@hobartblackwell.com>

to Anyms Sender

Who is this? How did you find this address?

**Anyms Sender** <cl9mto1udf@protonmail.com>

to me 

Hello???!! This is yr FRIEND BORYA!!!! Who else would it be calling u potter nd such ???? Congrats on fancy business email address! Just I googled ur NAME idiot LOL!!!! Since when does the old poofter use internet ?!?! Elder abuse 2 make him use fancy new system!! Use snail mail like a good boy!!

**Theodore Decker** <tdecker@hobartblackwell.com>

to Anyms Sender

I just wanted to be sure. It’s been months since Amsterdam. A random email from a bunch of letters and numbers doesn’t exactly scream ‘trustworthy.’ 

What the fuck are you on? Do you read your emails before sending them? Apparently not! 

It was Hobie’s idea to use these. He figures it’s more professional. He can use a computer just fine. 

What about you? What’s with the random string of text? “Anonymous” is abbreviated as “anon.”, not “anyms” -- that sounds like an obscure plant. Don’t you have a personal email?

**Anon. Sender** <cl9mto1udf@protonmail.com>

to me 

U sound like XANDRA! Apparently, apparently! I am high on nothing but life POTTER! and a little bit of cocaine! Good 4 him the old geezer!!! Did U remember nothing of our adventure? am in hiding, may as well be head hunted!! Laying low, as they say!! Never had a personal email and you don’t pick up the phone >:-( not the point anyway! I want to know how you are! You left so quickly I hardly get to say goodbye. What is the big rush? I am dying to know! How is the little snizhka??? And Popchik how is he? Tell me everything!!

**Theodore Decker** <tdecker@hobartblackwell.com>

to Anon. Sender

Have you been calling from a number in Bosnia and Herzegovina? I’ve been screening those calls -- I thought they were spam. Why not just text me? And why are you in B&H?

I had to get back to Hobie and the shop. Do you remember what I told you about the pieces? Yeah, I’ve got to buy all those back. I’m not even in New York right now. 

Kitsey is fine; I rarely talk to her. Popchik is going strong but may be deaf in one ear as of last week, as far as Hobie has told me. 

There’s not much to tell. I’ve been traveling, which is nice. I was in Reno for a layover which made me think of Vegas and everything else. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a dream. Right now I’m up north. 

What are you up to?

**III.**

I had already begun thinking of the story, which would become _‘the_ _manuscript’_ in my mind, when I stayed at Boris’ place in Antwerp. It was his idea, really. 

We hung our torsos out a high window, wide enough that we could both fit with an inch allowance between our arms, and passed a blunt back and forth. It had been so long since I’d seen Boris smoke pot, and his distinctive, foreign mannerisms were so startlingly nostalgic, a buried memory, that I kept glancing at him instead of the sparkling wintry street scene below us. Belgium is dark in a way that France and the Netherlands are not, and the white smoke from his white profile against his black hair in the black night, his black paint-pool eyes on scleral white, white teeth on the black cave of his mouth -- it was so striking, a film noir, and I was high as a kite -- that I missed his words the first time he spoke them.

  
“What?”

He laughed, teeth bared like a shark. I often recognized his deft cons for what they were, and it made him somehow more honest in my eyes for how easily I read him -- he couldn’t hide from me if he tried. I had probed him just the night before and been whispered to in his snakey hissing drunkenness -- the wife, the children, pulled from a Swedish homeowner’s magazine, so comical I threw up laughing. 

“Your writing, I said -- neimovernyy,” he said. “Fucking magic. Always thought so. You should put it all together, all your journals, write big fucking book. Fat old entsiklopediya.” He took a long drag and blew it all in my face. “I would read it.”

I coughed, laughing. “Yeah?”

“Fuck yeah,” he said. We had reached almost the end of the joint, and he inched his svelte fingers up the shaft, avoiding the heat but not urgently so. I wondered if he didn’t care, getting burned, if he was used to it as I was used to being left. Cigarette burns on his shoulder, forearm, thigh. “Would read front to back and then over again. You -- my favorite author.”  
  


I was taken aback. “Well,” I said. I waited for him to pass what was left back to me, and instead he put it to my lips himself, as he sometimes did; I inhaled too much, and I reeled back, hacking throatily. “Shit. I’ll -- Maybe. Huh.”

He leaned back, shoulder to the window frame, regarding me. “You should do it,” he insisted. Long inhale, then a plume of smoke obscuring his eyes like a veil. “Write about our painting.”

**IV.**

B&H

 **Anon Sender** <9uier75e08@protonmail.com>

to me 

New email!! don’t panic is me

**Anon Sender** <9uier75e08@protonmail.com>

to me 

I have no fucking clue where this piece of shit phone came from, bosnia i suppose, gyuri gave to me after our big adventure. Can’t text U because I don’t have yr number on new phone. 2 risky anyway. This way email is vry secure encrypted etc etc. poor fat old poustyschka! miss him. Where R U then? No kitsey? What happened 2 engagement? U with little red head girl then? was looking forward 2 big posh rich people wedding i had songs picked out 4 U! Wedding classics! Vry romantic nd such. Whole list. Mostly velvet underground. Have been listening to VU lately. What music do U like now? It has been so long since we laid around as boys in dirty desert headphones dangling listening 2 radiohead. Miss it vry much. Glad u r not wanting to die now tho. That is what i hope anyway. I keep thinking abt u sitting in amsterdam hotel cold drunk off ass wondering where i am. Fucking glad i found u when i did. U suicidal hooligan.

**Theodore Decker** <tdecker@hobartblackwell.com>

to Anon Sender

Why do you need to keep switching emails like that? Are you in danger?

I’m in Portland, Oregon. It rains incessantly here. I’m going to be in Sweden next month, if you’d like to catch up. Maybe I can finally meet your wife and kids, yeah? I’m dying to ask them about real estate.

Kitsey and I are over. I haven’t spoken to her mother yet, and I’m dreading it. 

I haven’t seen Pippa in a while. I started writing this story for her, and as I was writing it, it stopped being for her. It began as a gift, I wanted her to know me, but then I just realized how little I know about her. I still love her, of course, but I’m starting to think I might have a complicated relationship with women. 

Oh really? Well, now you have to tell me which. Make me a playlist. 

I haven’t been listening to music much these days. Hobie plays classical stuff on a record player sometimes, which I like -- Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Chopin. I found a beautiful old copy of the Beatles’ White Album on vinyl at an estate sale -- expensive, of course, but not an original (unnumbered, printed text, clearly a reissue). I played it over and over for a month or so -- drove Hobie nuts, I’m sure, although he’s too nice to say anything. You used to love that album. 

Laughing at ‘suicidal hooligan.’ Don’t worry about it -- everything turned out for the best, right? 

**Theodore Decker** <tdecker@hobartblackwell.com>

to Anon Sender

Boris, where the fuck did you find an original press copy of the WHITE ALBUM? Do I need to go into hiding?

**Anon Sender** <9uier75e08@protonmail.com>

to me 

2 remember me by!!! Dont panic, all good. Gone for a few weeks. C U L8R. 

Comfy in nautica(NYC remember?)-Panda bear

Coney island baby-lou reed

Dear prudence-the beatles

Its you-animal collective

My wandering days are over-belle+sebastian

Everything in its right place-radiohead 

Pale blue eyes-velvet underground

True love waits (fromNEW ALBUM!)-radiohead

After hours-velvet underground

**Theodore Decker** <tdecker@hobartblackwell.com>

to Anon Sender

Where are you going? I need to talk to you.

**Theodore Decker** <tdecker@hobartblackwell.com>

to Anon Sender

Boris?

**V.**

There was a moment, in Antwerp, when I knew I had the choice -- that if I asked, if I _implied_ , Boris would have me. We were high enough. It was my last night there. I would be gone early enough that we wouldn’t have to talk about it -- not in person, at least, not immediately after the fact. No strings attached. 

He’d been philosophizing, of course -- that was how it started out. Pacing drunkenly in the living room, ranting about a book he’d read. 

“Did you know the Black Death is reason for all this sexist bullshit? Most of it, anyway? Big fucking mess! Millions of people, dead, no labor force left -- church regulates fucking everything, says all you fuckers should be making babies. Said no aborting, no ass fucking, no Trojans, no abortion, all sex must make babies!”

“Boris, I don’t think they had condoms in the fourteen hundreds or whatever the fuck.”

“You know what I mean, what is word, for thing stopping sperma -- the fucking cum, what’s it called --”

“Contraception?”

“Yes, Potter! Contraception! No fucking contraception, said the church. Needed labor. Women -- produce labor force. Men -- labor force. See? Gavno! Fucking shame. It’s capitalism, Potter! Fucking evil machine! And racist, America and Western world, built on the backs of slaves -- it is inherent” (he pronounced it like _in-_ her-ent) “to capitalism, this racism, this sexism! Primitive accumulation of capital from Blacks, Indigenous peoples! Completely fucking evil!”

“Mm.”

“Imagine if world were not product of capitalism: everybody free, everybody fucking, big orgies all the time.”

He stopped, apparently having made his point, and wandered over to the sofa, where he collapsed. His head lolled briefly onto my shoulder, then back on the armrest. He flung his arms up suddenly, groaning, revealing a white stretch of midriff, whorl of his navel and black hair crawling down his waistband. He’d grown more hair on his body since Vegas.

Eyes closed in anguish. “Now I am thinking of all those sinful sex acts. Fuck, I am horny.”

Predictably, so was I. I imagined it: his narrow hand, so close to my thigh, sliding over me, the heat of his palm on my erection. 

I laughed. “Can’t you hire someone?”

“Never satisfies,” he sighed, almost too quiet to hear. “And always so fake. Too curvy. Unnatural.”

“You do tend to go for, uh, narrow-hipped women,” I observed. 

He grinned. “Fuck, that is what I love. When they are straight-like and hard. Not dress too girly, no frills and such. So fucking _hot_.”

I murmured, noncommittal. I had never had a ‘type’ when it came to women; I’d hooked up with plenty of random girls and always enjoyed myself, but the ones I showed real interest in had little in common. In fact, I only ever had feelings for two women in all my life -- Pippa, and then Kitsey (and, in the latter case, “feelings” may have been a stretch). Certainly I preferred a gymnast body -- I recalled the Dutch girl from our school in Vegas, lithe and strong, with her delicate features and foreign mannerisms -- but it was hardly a dealbreaker. 

“God, would give anything for a handjob right now. Or somebody to rub against.” He fell silent for a moment, not looking at me but at the ceiling. “ _Frottage_ ,” he said eventually, accent heavy and slurred. “That is what they call it in French. Rubbing.”

I hummed, casual; meanwhile my whole body had gone taut as wire, strung tight with a nostalgic blend of anxiety -- it was fear and anticipation at once, the nervous excitement that made my palms sweat and my pulse race hotly. I had not felt like this in years. Was Boris…?

But I could not bring myself to ask, not even as my head spun with images, motion pictures of our bodies, not even as my dick woke up in my borrowed jeans. Instead I recrossed my legs, took my glass from the weathered coffee table, and downed six ounces of vodka tonic with the vigor of a frat kid. 

“Woah, Potter, where all this coming from?”

I set it with finality on the bar cart beside me. “So. What do you think about Du Bois?”

**VI.**

_Boris,_

_I hope this reaches you. It took me two weeks before I realized I could just send mail to your address in Antwerp. I realize you’re most likely traveling at the moment, but I’m counting on the chance that you haven’t abandoned your flat entirely and moved to tax-haven Andorra or the secluded Russian wilderness or, perhaps most likely, Papua New Guinea -- your favorite place on Earth._

_I meant to tell you -- I’ve been working on a manuscript. Actually, it’s pretty much finished, now. I took your advice and dug through all those old journals, found a story in them. It’s just like you said -- a fat tome of a story, an encyclopedia. It’s about a lot of things, but mostly it’s about the painting. You’re the only person in the world who won’t be surprised by anything you read in there. It was also your idea. So, that being said, I’m including it in here. Every stupid page of it. You read_ The Idiot _in a few months when we were sixteen, so I’m sure this will be a walk in the park for you compared to that. You also know how it ends._

_I finally got around to sending some good old-fashioned snail mail. Does that make me a good boy? Hah._

_I hope you haven’t gone forever. I really enjoyed your playlist._

_Theo_

_P.S. Popchik misses you._

**VII.**

It would be months before I heard from Boris again. In the meantime, I threw myself into my work: I spent hours in the store, days and nights on planes, in customers’ homes. When I wasn’t working, I was rereading our emails. I played the same songs over and over, though I found a couple new artists I liked and felt pleased for it -- it had been so long since I listened to something new. Sometimes I took out the original press White Album; it was in remarkably good shape -- intimidatingly good -- and I was often too afraid to take it out of its dust jacket. The one time I laid it on the turntable, delicately positioned the needle on its smooth surface, I freaked out within the opening measure of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” and slid it anxiously back inside its covers. 

More and more often my dreams were sunsoaked and sandy, otherwise soft and dark, overwhelmingly hazy, an impressionist rendering of a little white dog, a body, a bottle of booze. When I thought of Pippa, the knee jerk reaction of my gut to begin pining was followed swiftly by vague confusion, thoughts like _why?_ and _to what end?_ , and one day I woke up and went about my day and realized, in the middle of speaking to Hobie across a sticky diner table in Harlem, that I had gone over twelve hours without thinking once of Pippa, and that when I thought of her my thoughts turned to the manuscript, which made me think of Boris, who was likely very far away and was he alright and had he gotten my letter?

I listened to dreamy, dissociative stuff; Arthur Russell, Stereolab, Atlas Sound. Music that felt surreal enough to pander to the dream-like haze I walked through sometimes, the echo of completion that had carried and sedated me through the final days of writing the manuscript. New smells enriched my vocabulary: Chicago hot dogs; Spanish moss of the American South; clean forest air of rural Canada; rainforest flowers in Puerto Rico; sweet, rich beeswax on merchant streets of Eastern Europe; jasmine and smoke of a Guangxi tea house; salty wind of the Mediterranean. I spent a week in St. Petersburg and wished that Boris were with me, knelt in Savior of the Spilled Blood and wept at the Winter Palace (embarrassingly: the furniture was overwhelming). 

I still kept a journal, actually, and one self-medicated night back in NYC I started to make a kind of list of my favorite smells:

_Lately I have been thinking a lot about the smell of things. I read a DFW short story on the plane and he writes everything with a smell; it’s visceral. I thought today about that potion in the Harry Potter series that smells like the things you love. I wonder what mine would smell like. I imagine linseed oil, old oak, tobacco, Pippa’s smell. But that’s not right, is it? I don’t remember what she smells like. God, I don’t remember what she smells like. Did I ever know what she smells like? I know how Hobie smells, like paint and dust. I know how my mother smells, decades later, would know it anywhere -- sandalwood perfume -- and my dad, beer and nervous sweat. I know the smell of Kitsey -- clean and floral, cold. Mrs. Barbour, a powdered replication. God, what does Pippa smell like?_

**VIII.**

Stepping off the plane to the hot mouth of Miami, I didn’t get farther than baggage claim before my phone started buzzing in my back pocket. Hobie. 

“Hey, I just landed.”

“Oh, oh, good. Good.” His voice sounded tinny and frail over the phone. “How is it down there? You’re alright?”

“Yeah,” I said. I looked around myself; it was late, maybe midnight, and there were fewer than a dozen people down here besides myself including the neon-vested staff. “You?”

“Good, good. Just checking in. Ah -- and, there is another thing. Well… I know you just landed… I hate to distract you from your work.”

I rankled with anxiety immediately, already bracing myself for whatever legal trap I had fallen into this time. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, don’t sound all worried like that, it’s nothing bad! It’s a good thing, really. You have a visitor.”

I frowned, staring out at the empty orbiting tracks, a pale universe. 

“It’s your friend, Boris! Popchik’s just delighted, you should’ve seen the way he lit up when Boris showed up at the door. He’s come all the way from Bosnia, can you believe it?”

_He lied_ , I knew immediately, and despite myself, I laughed. “Wow.”

“I had to tell him you’re off traveling -- He says he’s in the city for business, you see, so he’ll be staying on another month or so. That’s what I’ve gleaned, anyhow.” When I didn’t answer: “And how are you? I told him you’d be back in a week or so. Well, no matter, I’m sure he’s very busy with this and that, but I just thought I’d let you know.”

“Yeah,” I said, a bit dumbly. I cleared my throat. “Thanks. Is he --?”

“He’s staying at a hotel nearby,” said Hobie, answering my question in a beat. “Although -- he’s here now, playing with Popchik in the kitchen, hah! -- Well, I invited him to stay the night, I’ve just had a wonderful homemade borscht, and I told him he’s welcome to stay as long as he wants -- I figured you wouldn’t mind if he kipped up in your room, would you? Otherwise, he could stay in the other room.” _‘Pippa’s,’_ he didn’t say. 

“No -- I mean, yes, that’s fine.” I reeled with the information -- Boris, cooking borscht for Hobie? “Of course I don’t mind.”

“Well, wonderful!” I spotted my suitcase, an old heavy thing, antique in the pejorative sense. “When do you think you’ll be back? We can all have dinner together. My treat!”

“I fly home on the eighth,” I said, reciting without thinking a line I had fed to several clients over the past two weeks. “That’s --” I fumbled, grabbed my luggage off the racing conveyor belt, and panted over the line. “Sorry. Um, that’s two days from now.”

“Goodness, that’s soon! I’ll have to let Mrs. Barbour know; she’s been asking after you.”

My stomach dropped. “Oh.”

There was a beat of silence. I leaned against a charging station, bag in hand, waiting. 

“Theo… I --” Hobie sighed. “You know that whatever you do, whatever you decide, you will always have my support. But, that being said, I do think… Well, it would be the right thing to do, to figure this out, once and for all, don’t you think? I know it’s none of my business, but Mrs. Barbour, she’s a very nice, very reasonable woman -- Don’t you think you two, or, I don’t know, you and Kitsey, maybe you could sit down and have a chat?”

“Yeah,” I found myself saying. “You’re right. I will. Tell her I’ll -- Just let her know when I’m coming back, if you don’t mind. I can handle everything else.”

“Alright. Alright, Theo.” A pause. “I’m proud of you.”

Where I’d felt cold, sunken with dread a moment before, these unexpected words filled me with a fresh rush of warmth, and I found myself smiling into the receiver. 

“Well, anyway, take good care of yourself down there. Don’t go near any alligators. Your bedroom will be waiting for you when you get back.”

“Thanks, Hobie.”

“Not at all. Bring me back some oranges, will you? They’re really not the same up north.”

“Promise I will. See you soon.”

“See you soon, Theo.”

**IX.**

Boris, as I would learn in two days time, ended up splitting his time between Hobie’s and a lavish apartment-style master suite in Soho, and when Hobie led me to my -- Weltie’s -- bedroom upon my mid-morning arrival, there was a head of inky hair on my pillow, and a little white ball of fluff on top of that, and I smiled so wide, then, that my cheeks hurt all that day, from the moment Boris took my shoulders -- bare-chested and with a healthy, flushed look about him that I had not seen on him before -- to our dinner later that night, Hobie sat between us at a bar in a Japanese restaurant, catching each other’s eyes across steaming shells of saké and kaiseki ryori, his smile devilish and suggestive, a promise, a spell.

He and Hobie got on famously, and when the waiters finally kicked us out -- it was by then nearly midnight -- Hobie went to pay the bill and was bested, fast as a striking cobra, by Boris with a couple of crumpled fifties. For some reason, the image struck me as supremely funny, and I started laughing; Boris took one look at me and cracked up, too, grasping me on the arm:

“Potter, you are _drunk_ \--”

Which was so funny in itself that I doubled over, cackling, and soon Hobie could not help but join in, and the three of us laughed and laughed until our server took the check and asked us not unkindly to get the fuck out of there, which we did, once Boris had used the restroom and flirted outrageously with the hostess. 

That night, he retreated to his hotel, and I to Weltie’s bedroom. I watched him all the way down the street, until he blinked out of sight, as Hobie enthused about him to my distracted ear. 

The pillow still smelled like him. I put in my earbuds -- rediscovered weeks ago in an old backpack in the closet -- and put on the playlist from his email. 

_I'm not living_

_I'm just killing time_

_Your tiny hands_

_Your crazy kitten smile_

_Just don't leave_

_Don't leave_

**X.**

Boris had read the manuscript. It was the first thing he said when I saw him the next day, buttoned up and fresh faced at a Polish place in Greenpoint --

“I read your story!”

“Yeah?”

Smiling, wicked. “Yah. I liked it. No -- I loved it. It was, what is word, poetic. Big meaning, life-changing.”

“What -- profound?”

“Yes! That is what I mean.” He had ordered for us already, bowls of what I discerned to be duck blood soup, jellied pigs feet, and several potato dumplings full of sweet curd cheese and minced meat. “I have questions though -- many questions. Not a bad thing --” he rushed to reassure me, apparently seeing something in my expression. “That means it was good. I took notes!”

“Oh yeah?”

He grinned at me, beginning to fill my plate with pigs feet and dumplings, big scoops of a kind of carrot salad when it was insinuated on our overladen table. “Yes. So much about furniture. You love it, no? Was obvious, the way you write about it. And Pippa. Did you send her a copy?”

I explained to him my dilemma -- there was too much in there that Pippa couldn’t know, things that would make her complicit, things that I didn’t want her to know. 

“That is how it is with women,” he advised me. “They are great for romance -- great comrades, even, excellent fighters -- but secrets? Intimate thoughts, being vulnerable?” (‘Vul- _nair_ -eh-bil.’) “No good. They do not understand.” He tapped his head, a foreign gesture that I knew well. “Different experiences. It is better to confide in another man, someone who knows your pain as well as you do.”

I digested this as I tucked into the food, and I wondered if Boris had confided in his mother, if he had been vulnerable and young with her as I had with mine. I wondered if I had been vulnerable with anybody since, and then I looked at Boris, and he was watching me, a calculating look in his eyes, eyebrows expressive and white throat bobbing with deep swigs of beer, and I felt silly for even wondering. 

**XI.**

We stood on the balcony of his second-story suite that night throwing crumbs for pigeons, chatting intermittently about the manuscript, our shared past.

“You know you told me once?”

I turned to look at him; his fingers picked apart a roll, eyes somewhere else entirely. I had hardly opened my mouth to ask what, exactly, I had told him, when he barrelled on, appearing oblivious to my confusion.

“Well, a few times. Always very drunk, usually high, so much you couldn’t move sometimes. It was still you in there --” he rapped his head with his knuckles, meaning _‘your brain’_ \-- “but like you were talking to yourself, eyes usually closed. First time was that night I dressed you like a little shitting baby, you were totally fucking out of it.”

I was startled by the image. “What are you talking about?”

“You were sick from the drugs. I can’t remember what you were on that night, most likely was some combination of vodka and snorting crushed up pills of Xandra’s and your dad’s. Oh, I remember now, was that laced fucking weed I picked up from a new dealer, utter shite. It fucked us both, I wanted to die it was so bad, but you -- you were worse. You took off all your clothes and climbed out on the roof, jumped off into the pool. I told you about this part, I think. You were sitting on the bottom, would not come up, I had to get in and drag you out. God, you were not heavy, but you were stronger than you looked, Potter. You would not put on your clothes, kept screaming and crying, kicking and thrashing, got me good in the ribs a couple times. You were very suicidal that night, saying you were supposed to die, you wanted to die.

“I would try to pull a shirt over your arms, and you would not let me put it on, would fling your arms about like a toddler in tantrum. Well you finally puked, got it all out of your system. Big mess, all over the carpet, could not make it to the bathroom. I dragged you to the toilet -- you had shit yourself, throwing up everywhere, sweaty all over and shivering like a sick dog. God, you were miserable. Am glad you don’t remember it.”

“Boris, get to the point.”

He glanced at me, finally, surprised by the shaky quality of my voice -- as though he had forgotten that this was news to me, and not an age-dulled memory. The emotions that his words brought up were too muddled and agonizing to name, but above all was a sense of such tremulous anxiety that I got up and leaned over the balustrade, afraid I might “puke.” 

My plea was followed by what seemed, to my ears, a tense silence, and then rather suddenly his chair scraped back and he was with me at the railing. Close enough that his sweater grazed my bare arm, all damp wool and warmth. 

“It is no bother, you know.” He had made his voice softer than before, a decibel I identified as tender. “You would have done same for me.”

I had no answer to this; he was right, and yet this, too, rankled something uncomfortable deep beneath my skin, a feeling that was exacerbated by the next thing he said. 

“You told me that night that you loved me.”

His voice, those words: I remained still, unmoved, and only as he continued did it hit and draw a sharp breath from an impossible place in me. 

“I was holding you on the bed. You would not let me leave, not even to use toilet, kept telling me to just piss myself, hah! You were -- Well, you know, very out of it.” I spared a modicum of alarm at what this could possibly have alluded to. “No clothes, crying. I pet your hair, was thinking of all the ways I would fuck over that dealer, the little shit. Then you turn to me, pushing your little head up under my chin, and you say, ‘Borya, love you so much.’” 

Those words, again, a piercing blow each time he uttered them. “I did not call you ‘Borya.’”

Waving his hand, dismissive. “Boris, whatever. Same thing. Was the first time you said it.”

I had said it other times, then, was the implication. A thought came to me unbidden, a memory. “So, you did know.”

“Eh?”

I turned to him at the sound of a lit match; he was pinning a cigarette between his teeth, cupping the flame of his swanky gold lighter (it looked much like his father’s) as he lit the end. I remembered something he had said once -- that cigarettes and smoking are romanticized by tobacco companies for profit, advertising designed to tempt and trick. I thought of this and wondered vaguely how those movies had tricked me, that a little ugly stick in my friend’s mouth, his fingers, could make my blood burn and sputter like hot popping oil. 

“I --” My mouth dried up. “I thought you knew.”

“That you loved me?” He blew it out on a cloud of smoke. “Sure, you told me many times. Was not sure how you meant it. You never wanted to kiss, even when drunk, you would push my face away like --” He mimed a hand against his mouth; he was chuckling, though a bit numbly. “Sex with you, kissing with Kotku. Put you together and maybe I had a relationship.”

I was frowning at him. “Hold on -- ‘kissing with Kotku?’ I thought you two were fucking all the time.”

He shook his head slowly. “No.”

“But you said --”

He scoffed, all Slavic. “Was lying, of course. She gave me a couple handjobs, yes, was fine. Mostly we made out, and that was at school or at your house. She shared a room with her sister and had no lock on her door; we usually got high and talked about her family if we were sober enough. Was almost always high there.”

“I thought she was…” I couldn’t finish; I had meant to say, ‘I thought she was easy/slutty/all over the place,’ but that wasn’t true, was it? From what I remembered, Kotku had had a difficult life, and I was in no place to judge her. But still, I had the impression that she was fairly sexually active, certainly no stranger to sex. 

Boris shrugged -- _‘It is what it is.’_

“Wait. If you weren’t having sex with Kotku, and your Swedish wife was fake, then who _have_ you been fucking?” 

He plucked the cigarette from his lips, grimaced around a fresh trail of smoke. “I did not lie about that girl in the car. That was true. The handjob with KT was true, but it was awful.”

“You said you came in your pants before she even got the zip down.”

“I was _lying_ , Potter. God, you are so gullible. No, do not be angry, is very endearing.” He brought the cigarette halfway to his mouth, seemed to change his mind, and snuffed it out on the railing. “These past years… I have had women, here and there. Long term, no. I get drunk, go out, fuck and fall asleep. Myriam and I… She is very good woman. I thought I was in love with her, God, I thought she was sexiest woman I had ever met.” He shook his head, almost as if to himself. “She still is. But one night, I am shitfaced drunk, trying to kiss her -- she hits me over the head, says, ‘Borya, you fool, you do not love me, you have no idea who you love,’ and I cried like a baby while she took care of me all that night. She is the best woman I have ever met. No other woman like her in the world.”

I was shaking my head; I couldn’t believe it. Boris had always seemed mad about women, constantly infatuated and adorational -- borderline obsessive. His story tracked, but I was startled by the lack of real intimacy. His words were achingly familiar.

“What about the woman who got you into heroin?” 

Boris sighed, a mournful sound. “Ah, Petra. I met her maybe five-six years ago, friend of a friend of Dima. We had great fun, but she fell for some tough-looking meth addict type in the end.” Pouting. “She broke my heart.”

“Did you fuck her?” I felt embarrassed as soon as I asked; it wasn’t my business, was it?

Boris seemed unmoved. “I did, two-three times maybe, all high on E or maybe once smoking pot, cannot remember. Anyway, was not very good. Still, she was so _hot_ , this nerd type, yah? Rich girl, wore these sexy glasses, but had very tragic past -- molested by her stepdad, brother in rehab for heroin addiction --”

“Maybe you shouldn’t tell me -- Hang on, her brother was a heroin addict and _that’s_ what you chose to round out your ‘bad boy’ persona?”

Boris shrugged lazily. “People love what is familiar to them. And, we had a lot of it in storage at the time, figured I may as well taste the forbidden fruit.” He turned to look at me, and his eyes at that moment reminded me strongly of something I had written in the manuscript: Yul Brynner, that clever slant in his eyes, devilish and foreign. I was struck down by it, his gaze an unstoppable force against me. I felt pinned and, strangest of all, itchy and hot beneath my very skin. 

Boris smiled, greedy. “You are blushing.”

“What?” I brought my hands to my face, as though I could feel the redness of it. I felt hot, seen. “Boris, what -- What’s the point of all this?”

His expression slipped, eyes seeming to search me for a moment -- and then he looked away. Something unusual in the quirk of his eyebrows. Careful -- which he wasn’t usually. 

“Just thought you should know.” Casual flip of his hair. “Notes for your story, yah?”

**XII.**

We tucked in that night on opposite sides of the mattress. Around two in the morning -- sleep eluding me -- I felt him turn over in bed, heard his impatient little sigh; and then an arm was sliding snakelike over me, heavy and warm, and his body crept nearer, hand finding my chest, the collar of my shirt, long cool finger to my heated skin; his body narrow, muscled, chest to my back, bare knee poking my leg, the heavy settled smell of soap and sweat, tobacco, that smoky warmth, the foreign sort of clovey scent that pervaded his flat in Antwerp. He fell asleep with his nose in my hair. And it was all so familiar that my whole body seemed to ache with it -- like hearing an old song from your childhood, the stuff your mother plays on vinyl in the living room, dances to and swings your little hands in hers, sun in the windows or a summer storm, the overwhelming rightness of being home. 

**XIII.**

The next morning, before Boris woke up (his eyelashes: long, straight, feathery black), I went to the desk and penned a letter before I could change my mind. As I finished up, I heard rustling in the other room and a low moan. 

“Potter… Where you off to?” His voice was sleep-roughened, familiar.

I folded and pocketed the letter, resolving to mail it as soon as I could -- there would be stamps and envelopes at the front desk, I guessed. 

“Just out here,” I said. “You hungry?”

“God, yes,” came his impassioned reply. I heard him get up, bare feet on the rug, and pace into the front hall beside me. “Writing more stories, yes?”

I laughed, turned to face him. He looked like a Kiprensky painting. One of his self-portraits, I thought -- the one with the lips. 

“What?”

“Uh --” I was embarrassed. What was wrong with me? “Just exhausted, sorry.” I rubbed my eyes, berating myself in the privacy of my head. 

“You did not sleep well?” An expression of tender concern crossed his features; he brought a hand to cup my cheek, then pressed the cool back of his hand to my forehead. I could only stand and allow it. “You feel warm. Are you sick? How do you feel? Headache? Nausea?” He pronounced it ‘ _naw_ -shee-uh.’ 

“No -- No, I’m alright,” I said, and I did not pull his hand away, because I was afraid that if I touched him I would lose control. God, but I _was_ sick, I felt feverish all over, and I counted reflexively the days since I’d had a hit, and then I remembered that I was clean. 

Boris pulled back and gave me the once-over. “If you say so,” he relented, turning finally away. “Alright, well, I am starving, don’t know about you, but I could eat like Henry VIII just now! -- I need some protein, you know, something filling. Ah, let’s go downstairs, am sure they’ll have some brunch or whatever -- is eleven A.M, too late for breakfast, but what they call it, continental -- we shall get ourselves some of that, yes? Potter?”

I spurred myself to action, and we went downstairs in the same clothes as yesterday, yawning all the way and the stairwell full of his offhand remarks as he alleged to have a ‘thing’ against elevators. 

“Always avoid them if I can. God, they are cramped and so awkward, strangers coming in, trapped with you.” His mouth curved a moue of distaste. “Myriam was trapped in elevator once -- same lift as this fat white old bastard, sleazy _ublyudok_ , trying to sidle in close to her, all slimy like, get his hands on her. He tries to kiss her and she castrates the motherfucker.”

I realized I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, and didn’t ask for fear of finding out. 

We walked out into the lobby, a palace, and I got my letter sealed, stamped and dumped in a mail collection at the front desk while Boris hunted down a meal for us. We ended up bailing, wandering Soho for a place that was still serving breakfast -- we were both in the mood for pancakes, or, in Boris' case, syrniki. 

The whole way I kept looking at him, waiting for something, I don't know what. His hair was pulled back for once -- tucked under an inconspicuous black cap -- and I could see his cheekbones, vivid beneath his eyes, almost milk-white in the sun. It occurred to me that I should have wrote about that in the manuscript -- I should have written about his cheekbones, his lips, how his skin shone like scarred marble. It was all I could see sometimes, the savage wilderness of his hair, his spirit, chaos and warmth in his eyes that defied the planned, perfect lines of his face. His body with its cultish appeal, the way he carried himself like a sleek, slinky cat; all muscle and bone, skin like cream, hair black as wet earth; the length of his throat, a column ending in the corinthian curls of his hair, ionic lips, doric edge to his jaw. And as fervently as I wished I had written it -- as desperately as I wished I could speak it -- now, even -- I knew like the world was cruel that my words were all wrong, scrambled and sticky in my head, and that the great fear of losing him -- the greatest fear, my god -- was two times, three times as heavy as my love, and it was all I could think, and I couldn't do it. 

**XIV.**

_Dear Pippa,_

_I’m in New York as I write this -- staying in a hotel if you can believe it. And before you ask, yes, Hobie’s alright, I’m alright; just staying with a friend. Do you remember Boris? He asks after you often._

_I want to tell you, firstly, that I read the letter you sent me and appreciated it very much, and I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to respond. I do understand what you mean to say, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t come to the same conclusion sooner. I am grateful for your kindness and your patient explanation, and I want to assure you that, after some consideration, I must agree with you. I admit that it has taken some time for me to grow comfortable with the idea, but it does feel right, it does makes sense, and more than anything I truly want the best for you; and to your immense credit, as I’ve processed your words these past few months, I’ve been learning some new things about myself. Or, maybe not-so-new, but you know how these things go._

_If all of this is cryptic and nonsensical, forgive me. What I’m trying to say is that I miss you, and I’m sorry, and I hope we can be friends just like always. I hope that you and Everett are well. I promise not to buy you any more necklaces, not one, not ever again, although I’m afraid I can’t resist the books and CDs and all -- we’re so alike one another, I know intuitively what you’d like, you know? On that note, I think you ought to check out Slapp Happy, and I eagerly await your response (and recommendations, please). You’re the oldest friend I have, and I cherish that dearly._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Theo_

_P.S. Is Hobie gay?_


	2. Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said this would be finished a week ago, and in typical fashion, I failed to deliver
> 
> here is part 2 a week late and after realizing this is gonna take a part 3 to finish  
> :)<3

**I.**

It was unclear how long Boris planned to stay in New York. I tried asking him once -- peaceably, over brunch with Hobie -- but he eluded the question, instead suggesting with an air of baffling vagueness that he had ‘some things to sort out’ and, more or less, that his guess was as good as mine. This was a funny thing about Boris: as much as his work required, I assumed, at least some small degree of planning and forethought -- there were tickets to book, meetings to plan -- he had always lived utterly in the moment, as though life was an unfolding narrative over which he had little control. In fact, I doubted he was responsible for much of the planning in his life -- he had a driver, didn’t he, and who was to say there weren’t others working behind the scenes to bring cash to fruition? At this point, with the money he had, I imagined he could stay anywhere as long as he liked; he admitted this to me himself, even:

“Could move to New Guinea now, if I liked,” he’d said, licking croissant crumbs from his fingers.

_ “What’s stopping you?”  _ I could have asked, though I didn’t. Even though it was silly, even though the same question had surely occurred to him -- surely -- I could not bring myself to ask, for fear that my asking would incite that awful feeling I knew it would have in me, were I in his position: the suspicion that one was unwelcome. And above all, I wanted to convey this to him: that he was welcome, and more than that, I wanted him to stay. As long as he would have me. 

For the truth was that -- wet dreams and related items notwithstanding -- his presence here, seeing him nearly every day with Popchik and Hobie, on the streets of Little Poland, in Central Park, and particularly in places my mother had enjoyed, was so basely pleasurable to my anxious person that I felt addicted to it. There were nights we spent walking for hours after dark, savoring the ripe petrichor of spring air and speaking of all things, trivial things, happily bland things: the characters we encountered, the books we read, the food we would have, the places we vowed to go together. 

Together -- I had missed the simple kinship of the suggestion, that we had plans to be beside each other, experience the same things and speak of them afterward. It was this enduring habit to experience and reflect, part and come together again, that was the most satisfying; it was not like the codependency of our youth in that we spent time apart, now, both of us with our various commitments, and still we found time -- nearly every night, really -- to have dinner together, often drinks, and recount our days to one another, quarrel and tease, as though we were roommates who had lived together for years. I could not begin to articulate the other, more pressing likeness -- that we resembled something else, something nebulous and heavy. 

Though it was this that kept me up at night in bed -- in Weltie’s bedroom, in hotels, even next to Boris himself -- and this that all but tortured me at moments, unpredictably: One day it was the morning sun drawing all the lines of his laugh into sharp focus; sometimes it was his nearness -- when I turned to catch his expression and he was right there, already looking at me, close enough to see his pores. It was a comment he’d make, or a sound in his throat, or the way he played with Popchik -- joyously, like it was a thrill to be alive and to love him. It was once, memorably, the sight of his bare feet, long and knobbly and slightly coarse with hair, when he let me into his suite one night, one hand ornamented in pewter-y rings (which he had begun collecting and which reminded me strongly of his old leather bracelets) and the other fisting a bottle of -- I knew already -- crap wine. 

I was, for some reason, drawn to his ankles, which were densely hairy and prone to peeking out beneath the hems of his pants (for his legs were so long). That night, as I teased him for his taste in alcohol and he responded with witty jubilance, I would keep glancing at them, imagining the texture of his hair -- would it feel the same as it had in youth? -- and what I would find if I followed it up, up. I watched his neck, pale and smooth as moonstone, and the insides of his arms, and his hands -- they were quick, alive -- and his lovely collarbone, a sweeping bracket, a crossroads that led, at each point, to either strong shoulder, the black fuzz of his chest (I ached), the hollow of his throat. 

I admired him as I would admire a beautiful piece of furniture, a favorite work of art, and felt an inexplicable tortured pang at the thought that he was not immortalized in stone or marble, oil paint or watercolor. Though I found increasingly that he appeared to me as though he were unreal, a figment of genius imagination: he was leaning out the window, he was loping across a street, he was caught in unusual light, and suddenly he was unearthly beautiful, unbearably so -- a painting already; a work of fiction. I hated myself at moments, for I remembered the men who had stared so ravenously at my mother, and I feared I was becoming such a vulture. 

Boris, though, could not have cared less. He hardly seemed to notice it, even -- this creepy habit of mine -- and went altogether about his life and our friendship as though nothing had changed. And nothing  _ had _ changed -- not tangibly, at least, not really. Though it didn’t feel that way to me. 

I had always known the fact of his beauty -- a vivid, feral thing. When had it become unbearable? 

**II.**

“Theo.”

He seldom called me this; I turned and looked at him. 

He was smiling, and it was a sweet smile, honeyed with affection. “You like that.”

“What?”

“When I say your name.”

  
Inexplicably, I blushed. “I was just surprised. You only call me that when you’re being serious for once.”

He watched me. “Theo.”

My pulse sped. What was he playing at? “Boris.”

Then suddenly he grinned, dirty and quick. “Let us go out tonight. We’ll go clubbing.”

I scoffed, rolled my eyes. “I have work tomorrow.”

“Did not stop you last time!”

“Fuck you. Fair enough.” We sat boneless in armchairs in Hobie’s living room, both of us stuffed to the gills with pork sausages and edibles. “Where would we go, anyway?”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. You pick.”

I didn’t know any clubs. I knew a few gay clubs, embarassingly, which my eyes were wont to linger on as I walked around the city; I could hardly suggest these to Boris. “I don’t know any. You pick.”

He frowned, frustrated. “Come on, Potter. You must know somewhere. You are native New Yorker. Show your tourist friend the local haunts.”

“Don’t act like you don’t know your way around. What about that place you took me to with all the guys in gold watches and and the old pornos and shit? Let’s just -- Fuck, why don’t we just go for dinner or something?”

“I want to dance,” he said. “After dancing, we’ll eat.”

“But we’ll be starving by then.”

He shrugged. “Fine, we eat first, then go dancing. Have it your way.”

“But that’s not my way, I don’t want to go to a fucking club at all!”

“Why not? You really this big pussy, cannot even go dancing?”

“Yes, I’m a pussy because I don’t want to  _ dance _ .”

“Come on, will be fun!”

“No, Boris. Hard no.”

“ _ Theo _ .”

The way he said it, like he was holding it against me. I shifted in my seat. “Stop that.”

“What?” He smiled at me, a slow and dangerous thing. “Afraid I will change your mind?”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s fucking annoying.”

He regarded me. “I don’t believe you.” 

“Boris, this is ridiculous.” I took off my glasses and rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “Just go without me. I don’t want to go. I’m too fucking high, anyway.”

“You are supposed to be high, that is the point. Am not leaving you here, you sad little man.”

“Oh my god, fine. Fine.” I got up in a leap, and the room went lopsided for a moment. “Fuck. Let’s go. Come on.”

“What, right this second?” He followed me to the door, complaining the whole way. “How is that? One second, you are all ‘no, no, am too big pussy,’ now all of sudden you are ready and raring to go!”

We caught a cab, and the driver took us to a place not too far from Boris’ hotel in SoHo where, she told us, a friend of hers used to work and whose drink menu was ‘exciting.’ Boris chatted enthusiastically with the cabbie, mercifully leaving me to my inebriated peace. I closed my eyes and listened to them speak, their words hardly penetrating my high. I wondered how Boris managed to hold a conversation when he was out of sorts like this; I wondered if he’d just had a lot of practice, or if he enjoyed the benefit of the doubt because he sounded foreign. He had on a shirt I hadn’t seen before; it was scarlet, ash white and soot black, a Malevichian style print on rich, diaphanous silk. He looked good; he’d dressed up, probably betted on coercing me out tonight. He had on his fuck-me boots and all his rings and a new silver stud in one ear. 

He caught me looking at it. “New bling,” he said. He brought a hand to twist it in circles, and I marvelled at the way light stayed in one place, was consistent in its physics. “Got it done while high so the pain would not hurt so much.”

“Genius,” I said. 

He grinned at me. “You like it?”

It struck me as bizarre that he should ask me. Of course I did. “Yeah, nice.”

He leaned back, satisfied. “Thought it, ah, rounds out my bad boy look, as you put it.”

“New girl you’re after?” I asked it casually enough.

He looked at me sideways. “Fuck no. Am done with women. This is for me.” He twisted it again, like a girl with a piece of hair, and I noticed suddenly that the puncture looked red, tender.

“Does that hurt?”

“No, not really, is nothing.” He put his hand down. The cabbie had grown quiet; she was ignoring us or, more likely, feigning disinterest. “Just new, is all.”

“It looks painful.”

He shrugged. “Eh. Not so bad. Just wait it out, yah?”

“Are you, you know, taking care of it? Do you keep it clean?”

“Yes, Potter. God.” Throwing his hair back. “Stop this, you are soiling my bad-boy image.”

We pulled up a couple blocks from the place -- Boris and I needed the fresh air after our cab ride, which had smelled thickly of mildew and sweat -- and realized pretty quickly the character of our destination. Boris was more agitated than I was.

“God, all these hipster white people, they are like ants. Potter, we cannot get our groove on here.”

I agreed, though mainly because I had spotted a woman in the dense crowd whom I suspected was a college friend of Kitsey’s and who was boorishly defensive of other white women (and of course despised all men, but especially me). 

Panic made me take Boris’ arm and lead him swiftly away. We didn’t stop until we found a free bench, and we sat, shoulder to shoulder, both of us realizing at once that Boris’ dream of clubbing that night would go unrealized. 

He took a blunt from his pocket and, finding ourselves in a more or less private nook, we took turns taking hits until the buzz struck us anew, cross-eyed and dry-mouthed, Boris mumbling in Polish and both of us staring at the same puddle of orange liquid by our shoes. It was getting dark, and without the press of the sun, the warm air soothed us and made us supple. 

He began to hum, and I listened to him. I had missed his voice, his singing. 

_ You know my bip-bopping days are over _

_ I hung my boots up and then retired from the disco floor _

_ Now the centre of my so called being is _

_ The space between your bed and wardrobe with the louvre doors _

_ With the louvre doors _

“Sing something happy,” I told him.

“That is happy song. What more do you want?”

I thought. “Sing something groovy.”

He flicked me on the head, grinning. “Any requests?”

“That  _ was _ my request.”

“Can’t expect me to come up with song like that, Potter, drop of a hat, am too high. Your turn to choose.”

“Fuck you.” I was lazy, pleased. “Fine.” I took out my phone and opened up the music, a collection that I’d migrated over years ago from my old iPod. 

“Play the Beatles,” said Boris.

“I thought it was my turn to choose.” Still, I heeded his request, and Boris began singing cacophonously along in a beat.

“Fuck, Potter, perfect, perfect,” he was saying, and he took my shoulders, nudging me up, and I joined him, laughing, to sway there, shoes toeing the orange puddle. We were high enough that we had little regard for volume, or pitch. Nobody really looked at us, I noticed; we were safe.

“ _ HOLD  _ ME,  _ LOVE _ ME! AIN’T GOT NOTHIN’ BUT LOVE BABE --”

He grabbed my hand, spinning me, and I tumbled over into his chest, guffawing with laughter. We danced like children. I allowed a moment for joy, overwhelming happiness, to kick me like a line of coke, and I could only let it bubble up and fall from my lips as water, great belts of laughter flying from me and into his shoulder as I fell against him. 

**III.**

_ May 2 _

_ Bring leftover paint to hhw. Pick up 2L turpenoid, 8oz walnut oil _

_ REMEMBER TO CASH CHECKS _

_ 2125558767 cohen - call wed. _

_ eggs, milk, butter, oj, tvorog, apples, r caravan, rye bread, sauerkraut, pork sausages _

_ B skin - titanium white, alizarin crimson, winsor blue, indigo??, bismuth yellow. Looks like milky opal/moonstone/mother of pearl _

_ Hobie -- “How’s Boris doing? You’re always whisking him off before I get a chance to talk to him.” _

_ Me -- “You spoke to him yesterday.” _

_ “Oh, hardly! He was busy with Popper, that spoiled pooch.” _

_ “Well, you can talk to him tonight.” _

_ “Is he coming by?” _

_ “Yeah, he’s staying the night. Is that okay?” _

_ “Yes, yes, of course. He’s always welcome here.” _

_ (I smiled.) _

_ “It’s nice, what you two have. It’s nice to have a special friend like that.” _

_ “Mm.” _

_ Call psych about new med _

_ Schedule H haircut _

_ Popchik vet 2:30 Thurs _

_ Must learn to draw so I can draw him _

_ Contact Mrs B (SOON) _

_ May 3 _

_ I had a dream about Amsterdam, only the painting was my heart, it was bleeding, and his fingers were red with it and he saved it for me. After the fight he stood before me and opened my chest and put it inside. I could feel his long fingers reach behind my ribcage and tuck it in there. It was beating fast and I imagined it was the finch and that the beating was its wings.  _

_ Buy good vodka from int’l grocery _

_ B wants makowiec? We will go to little poland today _

_ dog food, dish soap, trash bags, veg stock _

_ Spent the day with B. Now he is out doing this and that. Will see him for dinner at LH tonight _

_ CALL MRS B _

_ Asshole waiter asked how long we’d been together. I don’t know why I do this -- I was so embarrassed, I just said ‘what?’ and kind of sputtered out something angry and stupid. Boris put a hand on my shoulder and told the waiter we were not together. Waiter slipped Boris his number at the end of our meal. I said, “What a creep.” B said, “Ah, but is so flattering.” He put the note in his pocket. I said, “Boris, you’re straight.” Like I had to remind him. He smiled, but it was not a happy smile, and his eyes would not meet my own. What does this mean? He was in a strange mood tonight. “May come in handy, no? Stranger gives you his number, may as well hold onto it. In case I need emergency blow job.” “I thought --” I could not finish, but I meant to say ‘I thought that I was the only man you’ve ever been with.’ He shrugged and, now that we were outside, fished a cigarette out of his pocket and held it between his long fingers as he searched for a light. “Mouth is mouth.” For some reason, this upset me, and I told him I had to go help Hobie with something in the shop. He let me leave. Now I wish I had asked him what he meant. I wonder how he would react if I just said what I was thinking.  _

_ I am sick of myself.  _

_ May 4 _

_ nat. fiber detail brush, linseed oil _

_ fat over lean/thick over thin _

_ estate sale 4pm sat, ask H for address _

_ Pippa’s letter came today. She says she thought I knew that Hobie and Weltie were in a relationship. Of course I suspected, but when was somebody going to tell me? P says everyone knows they were together but nobody talks about it. They kept separate rooms for appearances and usually pretended they were cousins or only business partners. They were childhood best friends. Pippa and Everett broke up and now she is seeing a French guy named Mohamed who plays the guitar and is getting his doctorate in microbiology. Already I know that he is not good enough for her. She says she is glad for everything I said and she wants to be friends. She is reading a book of short stories with Mohamed and likes it very much. She wants to know what I’ve been up to. She says it’s sweet that I sent a real physical letter and that we should be penpals. It’s weird how quickly she has receded from the part of me she used to occupy. It’s like a shrinking cancerous lump, if that’s even a conceivable thing that happens to people.  _

_ Need more tp _

_ tp,napkins,vodka,eggs,milkbones,garlic,sauerkraut,olive oil _

_ Can’t stop thinking about B.  _

_ I can’t see him tonight or he’ll know  _

_ I should not have had so much vodka. I am very drunk. I miss Boris. I think he’s in his hotel. I mean his hotel room. His lips are so red I can see them. I can remember exactly the color.  _

_ Boris called me and we talked like this _

_ Him: Hey Potter how’s it hanging _

_ Me: Boris it’s you _

_ Oh god Potter are you drunk?? HAH! _

_ I am so drunk _

_ You party-hardy without me, I am so hurt!  _

_ No don’t cry _

_ Am not crying Potter! You silly kitten, where are you? _

_ I’m at Hobie’s. (I burped) Fuck _

_ What is that in the background? _

_ What? Oh I’m listening to Radiohead because the email _

_ You are listening to Radiohead? Wow, really? Did you listen to the playlist I sent you many months ago? _

_ Yeah I did. Boris _

_ Haha, Potter, too bad you will not have wedding now to play it _

_ Oh _

_ Ah, too bad, how about little red head? Any chance we play it after all? _

_ No no not with her  _

_ Potter, cannot believe you drinking like this without me, you are so drunk! Are you blackout do you think? _

_ No maybe I don’t think so _

_ Shall I come over and relieve you of your drink? Haha! _

_ No don’t come over I’m sick _

_ No! You are sick? Fever? Is that why you drink so heavily? _

_ Yes that’s it  _

_ I will bring you chicken noodle soup, yes?  _

_ Oh god _

_ Potter! No, are you crying? Why do you cry?  _

_ God god  _

_ What is wrong? Let me come over, I will help you! _

_ No god Boris god I’m so sick. Oh god I’m gonna throw up _

_ May 5 _

_ Fuck my head hurts like a motherfucker. I don’t remember writing any of that. 11 missed calls from B. I let him know I’m alright but now he wants to bring me soup. _

**IV.**

We fell into the habit of listening to music together, just like the Vegas days, sharing earbuds and hovering over the iPod -- my phone, now -- like it was a source of warmth, a campfire. I had the experience of listening to “Bluish” by Animal Collective on a good high, it may have been ketamine or weed, and the song became so singularly, completely fulfilling, reminiscent of Boris, the whole of him. And then I realized he was sitting next to me, we were listening together. I wanted suddenly for his arm to be around me, so I told him:

“Put your arm around me.”

And he did, and more than that he pulled me into him, my head on his shoulder, and I closed my eyes and wept silently against him as we listened together. It was about him, I thought. I wished I had written that song, because it was about him, and I loved him. The sun was on our hair and the stone beneath our bare feet where we sat, cradled together, a pair of sad sacks in Central Park. I loved him. I loved him. 

**V.**

When I finally got around to calling Mrs. Barbour, the first thought I had was of how old she sounded, and then of how snobbish she sounded, and then of what Boris might think of her if I were ever to introduce them. 

I could imagine what he’d say: ‘ _ These rich Manhattan bastards. Outrageous. _ ’ 

“Theo, I’m so pleased to hear from you.” Based on her tone, she did not seem pleased to hear from me. “You’ve been awfully busy, haven’t you?”

I decided to take this at face value. “Yes, I have been. Hobie’s got me running all sorts of errands… This and that…”

“Oh, I hope he isn’t spreading you too thin.”

“No, nothing like that.” I knew what I was supposed to ask:  _ How are you? How is Kitsey? What can I do to make it better? _ But I dreaded the ordeal it would incur so that I paused before my next words. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to call.”

“Oh, no, Theo dear, don’t be sorry. This sort of thing happens all the time, you wouldn’t believe how common it is. Now that you’re settled, we’ll just get you sorted out and everything can go back to the way it was. No harm done, see?” She was so cheerful, so spirited, I wanted to say  _ ‘yes, yes, that’s exactly what I want, too. _ ’

Instead, I let another pregnant silence hang between us, until I had found the words I needed. “Mrs. Barbour, I know this is -- difficult to hear, but I do think that things are best left as they are now.”

Now she fell silent; where I had felt keen, prudently nervous before, now a rancid wash of anxiety snapped through me, as swift and primitive as blinking. I had to close my eyes. 

“That is a shame,” she said finally. “Have you spoken to Kitsey?”

I held a quiet breath. “I will. Soon as I can.”

“Alright, Theo,” she said, and I could tell she was unhappy, but I did not want to know the depths of it, if there were depths to be known. I wanted to get off the phone and have a drink. “Alright,” she said again, sounding surprisingly weary. I had expected fierceness from her, cruel and icy. Instead, I found her old, disappointed, even jaded. 

“I hope that you’re doing well,” I added feebly.

“You, too,” she said, and I noticed how she evaded and drew attention to my gentle probe. She  _ was _ angry, but she wouldn’t show it. She was too perfect for emotion. 

We hung up, the sudden silence full of my faintly ringing ears and the purr of the AC. Then I called Kitsey because I couldn’t put it off any longer, and the call went about as expected.

“ _ Theo _ ? Is it you?”

“Yeah. It’s me. I’m sorry for going AWOL.”

“It’s whatever, mostly mommy’s upset about it.” A pause. “She despises me and Tom.”

“Well, now she despises me, too, so maybe you two’ll catch a break.”

I could hear her surprise. “You spoke to her?”

“Just got off the phone. She’s not pleased.” I realized I had not formally communicated to Kitsey my plans to break up with her. “Um, I told her that it’s over. I should have called you first, but --”

“You wanted to get it over with,” she spoke for me. I imagined her nodding, phone cradled up against her ear. “I get it. She is my mother. And -- Theo, don’t worry about it. Really. It’s just one more brick in the wall.” I waited; she didn’t seem finished. “It was fun. I had fun. Let’s stay in touch, okay?”

But even as I answered, I knew that we wouldn’t, and so did she. “Yeah, of course.”

“Oh, and -- Theo, there are gifts from the party -- I’ll handle returning what I can, but if there’s anything we can’t track down or that somebody won’t take, I’ll let you know. You can have whatever you want.”

I thought about Kitsey tracking down the guests who had left us gifts for our engagement and was suddenly sad for her. I thought about my own work, about the sham of our engagement and the sham of the furniture and the sham of my life before Amsterdam. I thought about how I was her sham, Tom was her Boris, and this was right. We were fixing it. 

“Perfect,” I said. “Thanks, Kitsey.”

“No problem,” she said, and she was already distant, fading with every second. “Well, have a good night, Theo.”

“You, too.”

And I hung up, and I went to the kitchen so I couldn’t sit alone with my thoughts, and there was Boris on his back on the smooth linoleum, lifting Popper from his chest and speaking to his little face in low tones as his tail wagged at intervals. I leaned my hip against the fridge, crossing my arms, watching them.

“Potter, come, I have taught our poustyschka a little trick.”

“Oh, yeah?” I came to kneel beside them, Boris rolling to his knees and setting Popper delicately on the floor. 

“He’s very gifted, you know? What a smart cookie. Popchyk,” he ordered, and Popper sat at once -- “govorit'!  _ Govorit’ _ !”

Popper yelped excitedly, tail thwacking, and jumped to accept the treat that Boris produced from his clasped hand. 

“Yes, little snezhok! Yes! So good!”

“Huh,” I said, “I thought you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

“Whoever said this has obviously never met our little friend here,” said Boris. “Chubby little cotton ball. He is a genius, no?”

“If you say so.”

We watched him flop down on the vent, stubby legs kicked out at unlikely angles. He grunted and gave a pleased little sigh.

“He’s happy you’re here,” I said. 

Boris smiled faintly. “Am happy to be here.”

“I guess I should head back up to the shop soon,” I said at length. “Are you sticking around?”

“Of course,” said Boris, and he leant over to give Popper a scritch behind the ears. “I can help upstairs, if you want it.”

“Yeah?” It was the first time he’d offered. 

“Sure,” he said. “Unless I would scare off your customers. What do you think?”

“No,” I said immediately. “They like you.” It was true; the few times Boris had hung around upstairs while I worked, our customers were plainly charmed. They, like I did, appreciated a story, a history, the authenticity of a rough edge. Boris was all rough edges. And he, like the furniture, possessed a light, a warmth that evaded most everyone else, the corona of divine age, like he had lived and weathered more than the rest of us; it was how many of the great masters worked, tediously, lovingly, creating history in the many layers of thinned paint; it was a captured glow, broken-in and pliant -- kind. 

For a split second, Boris almost looked shy, but then he seemed to recover; he rose to his feet, ready to haul me up by the armpits, and gave me a shark’s grin. 

“Is the earring, yah? Very sexy. I knew it.”

**VI.**

**B PAV** <7hj1xbv9ao@protonmail.com>

to me

Hello theo! Am using a new email again. I must leave today. Business in Norway. I hate norway, is too cold, but alas. 

I have written a story for you. It is not nearly as good as yours. Still I want you to read. It is my so to speak version of events. 

x

PDF | answer.pdf

A Fool with a Heart

I was very panicked that night. He didn’t know it, maybe, but he would leave me behind. And it all happened very fast, so fast it could have been the drugs that stole all of our time left together.

When you are a child you count things. You count down the years until you are an adult. You count your friends. You count your enemies. You count the places you have lived. One thing I did not count was my time left with Theo. I knew, better than he did, maybe, that he would leave one day. But I made a rule with myself: I would not think about this. 

There was no warning that Theo would leave on that day. There was no interval of anxious anticipation, the likes of which I would feel in the weeks before my dad packed up and moved us somewhere new. 

I told myself: If he stayed longer, I would return it to him. 

I felt terrible. I can not say this enough. I was sorry. I am sorry. With my whole heart. 

And suddenly my lies came back to me like a ball of twine wound so tightly in my gut. All of my fabrications. I could never tell him, now, what I was. 

A woman is a tricky and wonderful thing. I have always known that a man should have a woman, many women, and should fall in love and be infatuated. Before my papa became a real drunk, he was a womanizer. He told me many stories of his conquests. He was very protective of my mom, however, and hated when she spoke of her lovers of old. He was a desperately jealous man. This I inherited from him. I think you also are the jealous type.

I will not speak of my time with Kotku because it is not worth speaking of. The truth is that all lovers pale in comparison to true love. True love is a lifetime. There is no saying for this; you don’t say you are in true love. You say you are in love. You say you love somebody, you do not say that you love somebody truly.

Though that is what I would have said, if I had any brains. There would be an explanation: I don’t know anything about myself. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to be in love. But I am in true love with you.

I remember how it felt to kiss your mouth. I remember your stunned silence and our little dog’s wet nose. I wish I had asked you to say it one last time. If you had said it, I might have left with you. I might have told you, and we would take the taxi to the school. I would throw a brick through the window and steal it back for you. Or we would have taken your taxi to a hotel with all of our money, where I kiss you again and again and we would feel giddy with freedom, and in the morning I would go to the school and take it freely between class periods. We would take the bus and watch Popchyk in shifts. We would arrive to New York. And we would have years together. 

But none of this happened, and I am a fool, and it has taken me this long to tell you. Now I am the one leaving and without even a kiss. You are the blood of my heart, Theo. Tell me that I am yours.


	3. Part Three

**I.**

The night before Boris left, I had a panic attack. In retrospect, I was probably responding to some unexpressed temperament of Boris’; maybe he was more agitated that night than I remember. He probably was. But I had drunk too much and smoked too much -- I felt sick with it -- and I remember concentrating very hard on not touching him and thinking to myself, writing down even, over and over that I needed to quit, I needed to get clean. 

“Boris, you need to help me. I need to get clean. You need to -- I need you to remind me.”

He’d nodded seriously. “Is good idea. No good for you, this drugs.” (He was quite drunk himself, at this point.) “Makes you dissociated. You think, is good idea to hurt yourself.”

“I’m not like that anymore,” I’d muttered. He didn’t respond, but I saw the cynical tic of his expression, and it angered me. “Fuck off. I’m not fucking crazy.”

“No, you’re not crazy, but you’re very depressed. You are anxious. You are probably traumatized. No, I know it, you are traumatized.” He looked at me squarely. “Tell me, Theo, you are happy?”

“Stop calling me that.”

We were sitting cross-legged opposite each other on the rug of my bedroom. He leaned onto his elbows, into my space, regarding me. “Answer the question. Are you happy?”

I thought about telling him to leave, to shut the fuck up and stay out of it. 

“You are happier now, I think,” he mused, tapping his chin with a long finger. 

I looked at him. Boris. “I am.”

He spoke at length. “Not cured, I know, but you are better now, yah? Not so repressed.” He barked a laugh. “Is funny, no? After all that shite in Amsterdam, god. I don’t know, maybe it helped. I don’t know. You tell me.”

I leaned back, away from him. Watching my fingers pick at the rug. “You know, if you had come any later --” I began. I tried again. “If you hadn’t come when you did, I might be dead. I got close. I fucked it up, but I started thinking, there are other ways. I was going to do it.” Boris was silent, listening. I glanced quickly up at him, found him looking at me. “You know, I wrote letters. Did I tell you that part?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “In your story.”

I thought about my coldly informal, otherwise rambling and incoherent attempts to apologize, explain, and absolve at once, utter mockeries -- insulting, really -- of the succinct, artful expression of love that I wished to convey, and I felt almost angry at those before me who had succeeded, who had left a bit of wisdom, even humor, in death, and I wondered how that could possibly be, how one could be so hysterical as to kill themselves and still have the presence of mind to be clever. I thought about the note I’d written for Boris, my only success; he was the only person to whom I needed to confess very little, and it was the only note that I felt carried a ringing sense of finality. 

“Potter?”

It was also the only page that I omitted from the manuscript when I sent it to him. “I wrote one for you. I didn’t include it,” I blurted in a rush, and then I hated myself, because now he would want to know. “It’s -- I didn’t want you to have to read it. I mean, it was pretty dark. I didn’t want you to feel guilty, or anything like that. Not that I blamed you in it. I just imagine it would be hard to read a suicide note addressed to you. That’s all.” I ground my teeth, I was so embarrassed, and still I couldn't stop talking. “I don’t even know where it is. I think I threw them all out in that, you know, that little trash can they keep in hotel rooms. I don’t even remember what I wrote. I was really out of it.”

When I finally met his eyes, Boris looked terribly pale, and I felt awful at once -- how could I lie to him about this? When would I tell him? How  _ could _ I tell him? “I’m sorry.”

He smiled and put a hand to my cheek, gave it a jaunty little slap. “Do not be sorry, kochanie. Let’s talk of happy things, yes? No good to dwell.”

I nodded, though I was stuck on the word he’d used.  _ Kochanie _ . “Yeah. You’re right.”

The night crept on, and then at something like three in the morning -- the two of us were sitting against the headboard, my laptop open on the bed before us and playing Tarkovsky’s  _ The Mirror _ , which Boris said I would like -- I got up to use the bathroom, and when I came back Boris was sitting there in the blue light of my laptop, the world soft and black around him. He’d taken his shirt off, I noticed: He was reclined, one arm bent back behind his head and the other scratching gently through the hair on his chest. I knew -- I thought -- he had heard me come in, though his face was turned away from me; I saw him in profile. The hand at his chest slid down, rubbed at his hip bone. Something about the way he touched himself with his long fingers. The light made him bluish, iridescent. 

“Boris,” I said, and I couldn’t predict what I would say next, I was possessed. “Are you --?”

He’d looked up, recalled from his still, pensive gaze, and now he frowned at me. I hadn’t finished my question. What was I asking him?

I shook my head, flustered. “Nevermind.” I joined him on the bed, watching my feet, the bedspread, anything but him. 

“What is it?” he asked me frankly. He was frustrated; I could hear it in his voice. 

I shook my head again. It was as though I was trying to shake the very feeling from my skin, the fever of knowing, of greed. “Can’t remember,” I lied. “Doesn’t matter. Let’s keep watching.” 

He didn’t ask me again -- uncharacteristically pliant, unaggressive of him, though I now realize the tension I felt was equally his as it was my own. There was a heaviness to our silence, and I felt it on my tongue, the weight of the words I couldn’t say. And as he unpaused the film, I began to speak. 

“I like it so far,” I said quietly. “You were right.” And then, “I haven’t watched any Tarkovsky. I should, though -- I watched so many Russian films in the early years, after leaving Vegas. I watched that adaptation of  _ The Idiot _ . I liked hearing their accents. It reminded me of you.” 

The movie was playing in earnest, now, there were important scenes I was speaking over, and still I couldn’t stop, even as I felt paralyzed inside myself with dread, even as I made no conscious effort to speak. And even then I could not say the words to him, the ones I should have said. 

“I listened to your favorite songs, too. I mean, just over and over. ‘Dear Prudence.’ I listened to that a lot. And that Velvet Underground song you were humming the night I left. I had, like, copied the lyrics down from some website, and I would look at them -- I don’t know, like I could figure it out if I looked long enough. You know one of my shirts, some of the clothes I packed, they weren’t washed -- I was in such a rush to leave that night, I just grabbed everything. Some of them, I guess you’d worn them recently. Remember we would share clothes. Anyway, they still smelled like you. And I -- I would sleep with them, you know, they helped me sleep. Especially in the beginning.” I was blushing, humiliated with myself, but I couldn’t stop. He’d paused the movie, though I noticed this somewhat belatedly; I wasn’t watching the screen, but my hands, which had begun to shake. I realized I must have spoken for minutes. “Sorry, I’m rambling, let’s --”

“Theo,” he interrupted me. 

My voice shook. “Fuck,” I said. “I drank too fucking much.”

He was quiet. I could feel him looking at me, black eyes laid heavy and searing upon my face. I had to ball my hands in fists, nails cutting into my skin, I was shaking so bad. 

A tide of nausea swept suddenly over me. I stumbled up, gasping, and launched myself into the bathroom, where I proceeded to vomit profusely, unfeelingly, sweating buckets as a foreign hand came to rest on my back and words floated whisperingly into my ear. I was so dissociated that I was not out of my body, but deep inside of it, as though the whole of me was sitting behind my eyes. I could hardly feel my own skin.

I leaned back, found myself cradled against him. I took his arm and held tight.

“Potter,” he said, “is okay. You are safe. Come on, breathe.”

I realized I was hyperventilating. My vision blurred at the edges, my hands and feet felt prickly. 

“Come on, Potter.” He put a hand on my chest, breathed slowly, exaggerated, against me. “In, out. In, out. Like that.”

As I calmed down, I began to cry, and he came around to kneel before me and wipe the vomit, sweat, snot from my face with a cold washcloth. 

“There’s something wrong with me,” I said. 

“Is alright. You are just spooked. Come, look here.” He tipped my chin up, and I finally looked him in the eyes.

“I’m sorry, Boris.”

“Do not be sorry,” he scolded me. “Let me help you.”

He led me back to the bed, where he discarded my laptop on the floor and crawled in next to me, cocooned in my bed covers. We lay on our sides, facing each other, his arms around me and my hands balled, fisting his shirt. He held me; we fell asleep like that. And in the morning, he was gone.

**II.**

Boris had left a shirt behind in my room. I had to wonder if he’d done this deliberately, remembering my drunken confession, or whether he really had just forgotten to put on his shirt. It was impossible, right? He hadn’t brought any jacket or change of clothes. A one of my sweaters was missing -- the one he always pushed his face into when I wore it, nosing at my shoulder, the soft-as-clouds angora and cashmere.

In the days that followed his departure, and then the email, I lay in bed holding it against me. It was a guilty habit: sometimes, as I worked upstairs, I would bring it with me -- I kept it in the bathroom, the desk drawer, somewhere hidden out of sight, and on breaks I would return to it, lower my face to its scent-soaked cotton and picture him. What else could I do?

I had no idea where to begin looking for him. I couldn’t go to Norway -- I had no idea where he was, and besides, I couldn’t afford to spend the money; I’d taken enough cash away from Amsterdam to buy back the furniture, but there wasn’t a lot of wiggle-room, not enough to warrant a spontaneous -- and likely fruitless -- trip to Scandinavia. 

It was hard, because -- here was the thing -- I thought of him constantly. 

I had thought of him before, of course. But now I knew. And he’d gone, left me with this, the burden of my desire. I didn’t have a fucking clue what he expected from me -- Did he want me to follow him? Did he want me to wait? 

I tried to email him back, and it didn’t go through -- he’d deleted the account. I was angry. I was sorry. I missed him so much that it hurt. 

I thought about what I’d say, if I found him.  _ ‘I have something for you.’ _ His shirt. That would be my excuse.  _ ‘You left it here. I brought it back for you.’ _

It was comical, poignant that I should think of excuses. What was wrong with me? Couldn’t I take him by the shoulders and kiss him, tell him how I felt, be honest with the both of us? 

I finally got the idea from Kitsey, of all people. She’d shown up at my doorstep -- I was coming back from lunch, and there she was, huddled under the awning with a frankly enormous handbag and a raincoat slung over her arm. 

“Theo,” she’d said. “Thank god. I thought you wouldn’t come, and I’d be stuck waiting out here for hours.” 

I was frowning. “Sorry, I totally forgot you were coming.”

She shook her head, scurrying after me indoors. “No, don’t worry about that. I didn’t call or anything. Well, I did, but you weren’t picking up. I just figured I’d stop by, in case you were around.”

She’d brought some things with her -- a teapot, a blender, some heinously overpriced condiments, all gifts from the engagement party that she couldn’t return. 

“Where are you off to next?” she asked me, and I had to think about it. 

“Uh, Paris, I think,” I said, and I realized this must be true, for Hobie had mentioned something about the Louvre this morning and the subtext had gone completely over my head. 

“Hm,” she said, and she left shortly after, once she’d said hello to Popper and I’d asked after her mother. 

And I started thinking, what if I did that. What if I took a train from Paris, just hung around at his apartment until someone let me in, took the key from the doormat and wasted away in there until he came back. 

**III.**

“Boris?”

For a split second, I thought I’d imagined him -- he was an apparition, a mirage -- but then, miraculously, I saw him turn, and he looked at me. 

His beautiful face. He wore an ushanka-hat, stallion black, and the ear flaps furred lushly against his cheekbones, his jaw, his hair curling within it, a single black lock wreathed coyly against his brow. 

“Potter,” he said, and he took a step towards me, and then seemed to stop himself. “What are you doing here?”

“You left,” I said. “I -- You said you were in Norway.”

“I was in Norway,” he agreed. “Am back now, as of yesterday.” He shrugged, sudden and familiar, and I remembered with a start why I was here. “Good timing, yours. Are you just now arriving?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t know what to say. “Um, you left something. I brought it back for you.”

“I see.” His voice had gone quiet, and I realized with some shock that he was blushing. 

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “It’s --” I gestured at my bag, though I didn’t look away from him. 

I paused. Smiled. “Are you going to invite me in?”

We took the stairs -- he was a couple flights up, but he had that thing against elevators -- and then he let me into his apartment, and I smelled it: that clovey warmth, the soot of his cigarettes and that invariable, almost subliminal redolence of vodka. 

I liked his flat. It was, as he always described it, an artist’s loft -- it had been a garment factory before the original owner purchased it years ago, and it had since been converted into condos, one to each floor. The space was enormous, truly; it’s vast openness reminded me of the desert, the museum, the feeling that you are shipwrecked and alone in an empty world. 

Though Boris had tamed it: Every inch, it seemed, was ornamented in some personal treasure, some fragrant, exotic token of his nomadic lifestyle. There were great Persian rugs that hung from the walls, overlapped on the concrete floor and an enormous yellowed map of the world, others of the various nations and territories he’d visited in his life -- even one of Las Vegas alone. There were paintings, none of which I recognized -- this comforted me -- and vases, and sculptures, and flags: The hammer and sickle, the circle-A, and his old homes, some of which I couldn’t place. And batiks, of course -- at least eight of them, maybe ten, and the old one he’d saved all these years from his bedroom in Vegas, which he’d draped along a wall in his bedroom. There were antiques -- nearly every piece of furniture looked thrifted, borrowed, found -- and the smell of old books, which lined just about every flat service, and some of the vertical ones, too, where he’d stacked them in teetering towers of dust and thick, age-softened paper. He had, it seemed, started something of a collection of knick-knacks from the countries he visited, and they cluttered tables, hallways, window panes in a manner that reminded me strongly of Hobie’s place. As was his wont, Boris had retaken to offering me his possessions as readily as though they were my own. If I lingered to admire a painting, a carved teak box, a stoneware tea set, he would nudge them invariably toward me, or say something to me like,  _ ‘Is yours if you want it.’ _ I had to wonder how far this offer extended.

As much as the building, the dimensions of the space conveyed alienating wealth, the contents of his flat were so plainly his own that I found myself at ease in all its enormity.

So it was with comfort, curiosity that I followed him into his kitchen, his enormous kitchen with its state-of-the-art wet bar and the utter mess of mugs and flutes and bottles that littered its pretty surface. 

It was dark outside, and the light he left on was yellow, filtered through a stained-glass lampshade on the island counter that I paused to admire (and which he inevitably offered me, and I politely refused). 

We had barely spoken the whole way up, and while this hadn’t bothered or troubled me -- it was Boris, I was me, and we were nothing if not fundamentally impolite -- I began to feel, as I watched him uncork a terribly expensive but obviously tasteless bottle of wine, that I ought to say something, that maybe this was immoveable -- that we were static, timeless -- until I said it. 

“I got your email,” I said, and immediately something in my body seemed to still, breath-baited, waiting. 

“Mm?” It was so unlike him, a foreign sound from his voice. He was frowning, swirling his crap wine on the countertop like I’d seen Kitsey’s friends do. I almost laughed. 

“Your story,” I began, and I could feel the tension in him, the heat of him beside me. He took a long drink from his glass, lips stained and puckered, and I reached out to him. My hand on his arm. “Boris --”

I heard his glass set down, saw the sudden change in his body. And it happened in an instant: He was kissing me.

His hands, cold, on my face -- his nearness -- the pinch of my glasses, pressed roughly into my skin. And there was the bittersweet taste of his mouth, his wine-wet lips. They opened against me, a hot breath of hell and the scent of his skin so close to me. There was a startling, immediate ache in my chest, a want so thorough and true that I shook with it, clasping his bare slender wrists in my shivering hands. Toeing closer, trapping him, so that he couldn’t get away this time.

I thought:  _ We did it _ . 

But God, for his voice, and the sound he made when I threaded my greedy fingers in his hair, when I pulled the curls at the base of his skull. I opened my eyes at intervals and could see his eyelashes, a black fan, blurry with his nearness, and I remembered it was him all over again -- Boris, my Boris, who had kissed me so long ago, who grabbed me now and moved our bodies so I was the one pinned brutally into the countertop. 

My glass crashed to the floor. We looked: it was a mess, splinters of glass and a spreading, bloody stain. 

“Jesus fuck,” I said. “Fuck, I’m sorry.” I stumbled back, but he caught me -- grip reckless -- and pulled me roughly into him. Kissing me, my cheekbone, my jaw, the hollow of my neck. 

“Fuck that,” he said, and I remembered again that a glass had broken, it would stain, we should clean up. “Fuck the glass. Does not matter, Theo.”

He held me by the back of my neck, his other hand in my hair. I melted for him. “Are you sure,” I said, hardly recognizing my voice, and he silenced me -- hand clasped briefly to my lips, his own mouth laving at my collarbone. 

He began to kneel before me. 

“Stop --” I gasped -- “you’ll hurt yourself --” And I put my arms around him and wrestled him up, held him there, pressed head to heels against me. I felt his shallow breaths hot on my neck, his chest ballooning against me, the warm press of his erection on my thigh. 

He fisted the back of my shirt, leaning against me. I heard and felt him curse into the skin of my neck. “Let me,” he said, “I want to taste you, Theo, god I want it.”

“Not here,” I said. It was hard to concentrate. His smell was everywhere. “Let’s -- Your bedroom.”

“Bed. Yes. Good idea,” he said. And he pulled my forehead to his, eyes a searing flash of contact, and then released me. 

He put a hand to the small of my back, suddenly gentle, and we wandered, stumbling, into his room. It was dark: he went to turn on the light, and I stopped him. 

“The moon,” I said, and he understood. 

We undressed quickly and laid on the bed, hands heavy and curious, my skin alight with the mark of him. I ended up beneath him, and I loved how he felt: pressing me down, a perfect, steadying weight. His skin, his hair, his scars -- he felt amazing, sliding against me like that, hands on each other's chests, backs, arms, our mingled sweat and precum a slippery mess between us. 

“We need condoms,” I remembered to say. “Have you been tested?” I was panting, holding his hair back from his face as he sucked my nipple. 

He surfaced, licking his lips, and watched my mouth as he spoke. “I’m clean,” he managed, “are you?”

“I’m clean,” I echoed him. “Lube,” I said.

He climbed off me to root around in his bedside table. I watched his ass, milk-white and hairy. His muscles jumped as he moved. I held my weeping dick at the base, squeezing, begging my body to behave. 

My legs were bent open, but this was not enough, and he ushered me to lift my hips for him so that he could wedge a pillow beneath me. 

“Good, good,” he murmured. His moon eyes touched my body like a heavy hand, flicked across my chest and down between my legs, where he brought his thumbs to part me open. I was open for him.

A faint ringing began in my ears -- my breathing was shallow, pulse quick like a spooked rabbit. I took my glasses from the pillow and slid them gracelessly up the bridge of my nose, which elicited a smile from him -- this expression, more than anything else he was doing to me, made me blush like a virgin. I felt his thumb slip into the crevice of my ass and stroke me there. Up and down; tenderly. His other hand came to spread me more aggressively open, fingertips tucked against my balls. 

He gave my cock a little squeeze and brought his fingers to his lips and swallowed them -- gaze flicking between my eyes, my mouth. He spat, dribbling down his chin for he lathered them so well, and his red lips shone with it -- wet jewels, slippery with spit. It was cool on my skin when he brought them to my asshole -- I shivered -- and then he wiggled them a little and pushed, and suddenly, strangely, I felt him. 

“Fuck,” he whispered. He swirled around, moved back and forth, squeezed in a second finger. “Fuck, Theo.” His voice was soft, broken. “You are so  _ tight _ .”

He began to piston them -- fucking me, I realized, so slowly, gently, and my dick jerked and weeped on my stomach. I liked it when his motions went fluid, feeling me out -- rubbing, circling inside me. 

It was dirty. His spit in my ass. His fingers pushing, slippery, inside of me. The utter focus of him -- biting his lip, a little furrow between those expressive eyebrows. His eyelashes fanned on his cheeks; and then he looked up at me, suddenly, and smiled. Fingers crooking wetly inside of me.

I stared up at him, stunned.

“You like that, Potter?”

His voice had fallen into something deep, distinctly Slavic. I closed my eyes on the picture he made; it was too much. A shuddering breath fell out of me. I whipped my hand up to the headboard, grappling to fist around a column of buttery oak, and I soothed it with my fingers, grounding myself, then opening my eyes to look at him: Boris, watching me, fingers more confident by the moment, as though digging me open, a slick well. 

“Tell me,” he said. 

I felt my face contort in pleasure, frustration. “Boris,” was all I could say.

He smiled. “Tell me what you want, Theo.”

I had to close my eyes again. I was gritting my teeth, panting through my nose.

“Open your fucking eyes.”

I inhaled sharply and obeyed. God, the sight of him. 

“Such a good boy for me,” he praised. He was smiling like he’d told a joke. 

He had brought his other hand to my dick and was palming the head, teasing the glans with his thumb. A dribble of precum rolled down his fingernail. 

By now he had three fingers in me; he leaned down and spat again, the feel of it ticklish and warm. I kept my eyes on him now. The ringing in my ears was thick, I was dizzy with it.

I felt him move somehow, shift his fingers inside of me, and then, god, I felt it, he was hitting my prostate. 

My mouth fell open on a sound. For once, his face went slack as he watched me, seeming fascinated by my expression. 

He held my dick at the base of the shaft as he pumped into me, hitting that spot every fucking time, making me gasp and chant:

“Ah -- ah -- ah -- ah --”

“O, moy Bog, detka.”

I rocked back on him, shameless, and clenched my hands until I had to bring one to my dick, I was so hard --

But he slapped my hand away, and I watched in astonishment as his tongue slipped kitten-like from his lips and lapped up the shedding precum from my cock, my balls, my stomach. He moaned greedily as he went, so that I felt a hum of vibration where his mouth touched me; then he pulled back, still fisting the base of it, and pillowed his cheek on my thigh as he watched his fingers move in and out of me. 

He began babbling, muttering in Russian -- Polish -- Ukrainian, I could hardly distinguish one language from another. It was like he was drunk. Though I caught this:

“Kocham twoje ciało. Kocham Cię.”

“Fuck. Speak English.”

He leaned over me, fingers slow and deep, lanky black hair tickling my stomach, and laid a lingering kiss on the stretch of skin along my hip bone. 

“Theo…” he murmured. “Don’t be mad… I want you to fuck me.”

I was so dizzy with pleasure that I had to ask him to repeat himself. When I understood, I frowned.

“Why the fuck would I be mad? God, Boris.”

He pulled his fingers out of me very gently, mumbling endearments into my skin. “Kochanie. My Theo. So good to me.” He kissed the crease of my thigh, my belly button. “I have thought about this, I imagine it. To have you fucking me.”

I counted my breaths, white-knuckled his shoulder. “Come here,” I said. 

He looked up, eyes innocent, and rose to kiss me. He tasted like cum and bad wine and sweetness. 

“I always meant it,” I whispered when he moved to kiss along my jaw. “You know that?”

He rested a moment, put his forehead to the curve of my neck. “I know,” he said.

We were still for a moment, as though we both were waiting for the words in me to present themselves, a prayer. “I love you.”

He breathed in, out. “Theo,” he said. “Theo. Blood of my heart.” His lips touched my neck as he spoke. “I am in love with you.”

Something in me swelled, lifted. “Well,” I said quietly, “I’m in true love with you.”

His hands, where they touched me, held fast, squeezing me painfully, even as he laughed. 

“God,” he said, “I have wanted this.” 

I pushed his shoulder, and he went with it, rolling onto his back and allowing me to comb his hair back from his face, curls of ink on the pillow. 

“No condom?” I asked again. 

He nodded, firm. “I want you to cum in me.”

I had to close my eyes for a moment. “Fuck, Boris.” I felt him take my hand, guide it down between his legs. As I watched him guide me, my fingers landed on the soft skin of his perineum. He had spread his legs for me, as I’d done for him. 

“I have not prepared,” he confided quietly. 

“Doesn’t matter,” I said, kissing him. 

We went slow. I made myself relax, withdraw from my instincts, as I fingered him. We got a pillow under his hips, as he’d done for me; I used a lot of lube. The whole time, he watched me, not making a sound as he studied my face, rocking back on me. 

When I aimed, pushed into him, I had to still there -- halfway inside him -- both for his sake and because it felt so fucking good, so plainly right, that I was afraid I’d cum in him on the spot like a teenager. And I wanted to make this good for him.

He coaxed me forward, taking me by the ass and pulling me steadily into him. I felt him pulse around me, tight and slick and searingly hot, and as sweat dripped from my forehead, my chest onto his prone body below me, I bent my head and kissed him, and I told him I loved him, that he felt so good, that his body was incredible, it had always been incredible. I said he was beautiful, he was so fucking beautiful, and I rocked into him again and again, and he pushed his hips up until he had me where he wanted, so that he threw his head back and howled with pleasure -- I was hitting his prostate, I guessed -- and held his dick and squeezed himself, cockhead purple and saturated, and began chanting, babbling in other languages, incomprehensible to me even as I knew without looking, without hearing, without asking how he felt. 

He came in ribbons. I was bent over him and sliding in it, his cum and our fragrant sweat, and as I finished inside him he stared at me, begged me to look at him, and I did. 

I pulled gently out of him. Cum dripped, stained his sheets. I lay beside him and took him immediately, sweaty and flushed in my arms, and kissed him bruisingly. 

“What is wrong?” he asked, and I realized I was crying.

I wiped wonderingly at my eyes. “I don’t know. I’m just -- I don’t think there’s anything wrong.” I looked at him, his beautiful face, flushed and glowing with perspiration. “I just feel so happy.”

**IV.**

_ Boris, _

_ A part of me accepts that you’re dead, or in trouble, but for the sake of my own selfish piece of mind right now I’m pretending it isn’t true. As vampirish as you are, pale as death, I can’t fathom the idea of your life, over. Maybe you feel the same about me. I don’t know. I’m sorry if you do. _

_ More than anything it feels like a betrayal to kill myself now after I promised I’d wait for you. But it also feels like a betrayal on your part, that you never came back. I don’t know, maybe you will, and you’ll find me first. I would hate that, but it makes a sick sort of sense.  _

_ But I know you would understand. Of course you would. You know, better than anyone in the world, how I exist in this life, and the depths of my misery, how far I would go to end it. Thank you for cleaning up after me. Thank you for dragging me inside when more than anything I wanted to sink into the very earth. Thank you for saving my life so that I could meet you again, all these years later, so that I could live with Hobie and take care of Popchik and deal antiques. I am grateful for all of it.  _

_ I feel with every day that passes I’m becoming more like my dad. You never met my mother -- I wish you had -- but if I could choose a parent to become, it would be her. We’ve talked about this, I’m sure of it: We would both choose our mothers. But you don’t get to choose the parent you become. You don’t get to choose the parent who dies last. It makes me sick to look in the mirror and see him, his features, his stupid confidence, where I wish I could see her. I know you didn’t hate him, not like I did, but you always said you were on my side. I’m grateful for that. Maybe now you will understand, too, why I hate myself.  _

_ I have always wanted to hold on to the years when she was with me, when she shaped me in her image and made me good. I spent too many years with my dad, and not nearly enough with my mom, and I will never forgive God, or the universe, or whatever the fuck for this. This was the final nail in my coffin. Before she died, I could have been good.  _

_ Boris, I’m sorry. As I’m writing this my hand is shaking and I’m so high and drunk that the paper I write on feels at times like all there is in this room. It surrounds me. It begs of me. I have nothing to give it, I’m famished. But I have so much to tell you. There is so much I wish I had told you in person. So many times I look at you and I know what I need to tell you, but the words refuse passage. I don’t know, maybe you get it. You usually know what I’m talking about. This is my last chance, though.  _

_ I want you to know that I loved you. I guess I still do. Well, I know that I do. I was going to tell you, the night that I left Vegas for good. It was right on the tip of my tongue. But I have a hard time being honest sometimes. I have always been this way. More of my dad, maybe.  _

_ In spite of your taking the painting, or perhaps in my sick way because of it, I feel like you are the only person alive I will ever really trust. I am in love with Pippa, but you are my only friend. You are my true friend. I always struggled to put a word to us, but I know how I feel. You are the only person who knows me. And I’m sorry that I am such a difficult person to know. I’m sorry for being a jealous, maniac friend. I’m sorry I didn’t beg you to come with me. God, I miss you. I missed you.  _

_ I need to stop now, or I’ll ramble on forever. You know how I get. _

_ For some reason, although I think I know why, that song is coming to me. I hear you humming it.  _

_ This is the second time I leave you. I’m sorry, Boris, that I have never been patient, or honest, or wise.  _

_ I’m in love with you. There, I said it.  _

_ Theo _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's all folks! leave a comment if you feel like it, i love them :)
> 
> I'm going to go back and make some edits to this fic soon, probably nothing major, but as i mentioned in the first chapter notes this is unedited as is. 
> 
> I'm on Tumblr at @weirdbody (memes, politics) and @strangeorgan (art)

**Author's Note:**

> get your ass in gear and donate, sign, share for the liberation of Black people!!!!! https://linktr.ee/blacklivesmatter
> 
> follow me on Tumblr at @weirdbody for memes or @strangeorgan for art :)


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